Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably—to them—affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.
The attempt to find weather correlations universal to all humans seems misguided to me. Different people react to weather differently. I get more energy from high and dry, but there are people who get more energy from low and wet, and I know one girl who switched after being pregnant and giving birth. You take a group average and it will come to about zero, but that just masks individual reactions.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don’t see why you would dismiss them so readily. It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there’s a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out.
Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:
These include age and its square, the number of household dependents aged between 0 and 24 years, and the natural logarithm of nominal household disposable income for the previous financial year in Australian dollars. Dummy variables are also included for disability status, employment status, marital status and education. These controls are typically the most important determinants of self-reported life
satisfaction
That’s not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.
It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
I don’t have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don’t seem to have any reason to lie about it.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects
I didn’t say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.
And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that “bad air” which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.
People think a lot of mistaken things about their personal psychology. But the weather correlations are still small: ‘Does Life Seem Better on a Sunny Day? Examining the Association Between Daily Weather Conditions and Life Satisfaction Judgments’, Lucas & Lawless 2013; ‘Subjective wellbeing: why weather matters’, Feddersen et al 2015. I found the same thing in my data so far. May just be setpoints.
The attempt to find weather correlations universal to all humans seems misguided to me. Different people react to weather differently. I get more energy from high and dry, but there are people who get more energy from low and wet, and I know one girl who switched after being pregnant and giving birth. You take a group average and it will come to about zero, but that just masks individual reactions.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don’t see why you would dismiss them so readily. It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there’s a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.
Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:
That’s not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.
I don’t have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don’t seem to have any reason to lie about it.
I didn’t say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.
And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that “bad air” which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.